saves are in roaming folder, not local

[LoSboccacc]

not filing a bug because I just want to know the rationale behind this, if you did it deliberately or out of habit.

Factorio saves can get quite big and placing a hundreds mb in the roaming folder is not really a good thing for the user.

not that it matter much as people using roaming properly are few and it is a relic of the forgotten past now that everyone is reinventing it using dropbox and other solutions (ah, reinventing the wheel - at least if they worked as well as a roaming profile - but I'm digressing).

[Nova]

A better question: Where's the difference between roaming and local? I neither did understand why they even exist. It's pretty hard to get to them for someone who doesn't know they exist.

Then again, I don't understand why people use the installer version of the game...

[LoSboccacc]

if you are in a domain with a roaming profile the roaming folder gets uploaded on logoff and downloaded on login across multiple computers.

[Boogieman14]

Roaming profiles are primarily a business type of thing. It allows for workers to log in on any PC and still get all their settings as if they're always on the same PC. Back in the Windows XP days, there was no distinction between local and roaming. Starting with Windows 7 (probably Vista, but since I never touched that, I can't say for certain) a separate Appdata\Local was introduced. Since many programs rely on %APPDATA% pointing to a location that's included in the roaming profile, %APPDATA% points to Appdata\Roaming and a new variable %LOCALAPPDATA% was introduced for Appdata\Local. I suspect the devs just picked %APPDATA% and didn't give this subject matter any more thought (and I think they also shouldn't, I'm fairly certain the number of PCs that utilises Roaming profiles and also has an install of Factorio can be counted on the fingers of one hand)

[Peppe]

I just used the zip of the game and the save path is in the game folder.

The installer must set the save path?

Seems like a rare issue as others have mentioned. Roaming profiles are for Domains, which are usually for businesses. Businesses usually do not want users installing things on their work machines... especially games. So even if you have admin access to do an install you probably should not...

In a scenario that you run your own local domain the data size should not be an issue as your transfer rates on a local LAN should be enough.


What if you wanted access to the same saves across multiple machines? Wouldn't the current roaming setup be beneficial?

[Align]

Given that they had the option of just leaving everything in the game folder like with the zip files I would guess that it's deliberate, so you can easily play your save with your mods on another computer. Though I had no idea that functionality was what the Roaming folder was for before this thread.